We believe technology is best when it works for everyone. That's especially true when it comes to accessibility. For a long time, people have had to adapt to technology – we want to build technology that adapts to them.
That's the idea of Natively Adaptive Interfaces (NAI), an approach that uses AI to automate product accessibility, not an afterthought. The goal of our research is to create assistive technology that is personal and efficient from scratch.
How Natively Adaptive Interfaces work
Instead of building accessibility features as a separate, “bolt-on” option, NAI enables flexibility in product design from the start. For example, an AI agent built on the NAI framework can help you accomplish tasks with your guidance and supervision, intelligently reconfiguring itself to deliver accessible, personalized information. In our research prototypes that helped validate this framework, a main AI agent could be used to understand your overall goal and then collaborate with smaller, specialized agents to handle specific tasks – like making a document more accessible by adjusting the UI and scaling text for personalized information. For example, it may generate audio descriptions for someone who is blind or facilitate page layout for someone with ADHD.
This often creates a “cutting edge effect,” where a feature designed for a specific need ends up being useful for everyone. A voice-controlled app designed for someone with a disability, for example, can help a parent with a child.
Construction and people with disabilities
The NAI framework is guided by the main principle: “There is nothing about us, without us.” Engineers work with the disabled community throughout their design and development process, ensuring that the solutions they create are useful and usable. With help from Google.org, we're funding leading organizations that serve disability communities – such as the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (RIT/NTID) of the Rochester Institute of Technology, The Arc of the United States, RNID and Team Gleason – to build effective AI tools in their communities to solve real-world conflict zones.
